An open letter to early years teachers: Ferreiro and Teberosky, half a century on

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What we have learned since then about teaching children to write

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Miguel Ángel Tirado

I am writing to you, an Early Years teacher, with great respect and admiration, to share some thoughts on how we teach young children to write. I do so because few stages of education are as important in reducing the inequalities that exist between children when they start school. Not all children grow up surrounded by the same books, conversations or written words, but school can give every child the opportunity to access written culture, regardless of the circumstances into which they were born.

Perhaps in your school, as in many others, you observe how children’s writing develops according to the categories proposed by Emilia Ferreiro and Ana Teberosky (1). You will recognise, for example, when a child is still producing scribbles or isolated letters without relating them to the sounds in words (what they called pre-syllabic writing), and when another child begins to match each letter to a syllable, moving towards syllabic-alphabetic writing. But does this mean that writing develops as though it were a natural learning process, similar to speech?

Nearly fifty years ago, the research of Ferreiro and Teberosky showed that children do not simply copy what they see, but develop their own ideas about how writing works and modify them as they try to make sense of it. From this perspective, it became particularly important for children to learn through contact with real texts and in situations where reading and writing had a purpose and meaning for them. But, half a century on, what have we learned since then?

Today we know that learning to write is not a developmental process comparable to the acquisition of spoken language, but a form of cultural learning that needs to be taught. A common response when a child is not progressing at the same pace as their classmates is to say that they are “not mature enough”. But what does it mean to be mature? Can knowledge that does not develop on its own simply emerge through maturation? Perhaps what we call maturity actually depends on what each child has had the opportunity to learn and how they have been taught.

Perhaps Ferreiro and Teberosky’s greatest contribution was not to tell us how we should teach, but to help us understand how children think when they first begin to grapple with writing. The problem arises when we move directly from this explanation of how they learn to deciding how we should teach, and then trust children to work out for themselves how the writing system works.

That is why it is worth separating two questions we tend to confuse: understanding how a child learns is one thing, and deciding the best way to teach them is another (2). The fact that children develop their own ideas about writing does not mean that we should wait for them to discover for themselves what we can teach explicitly. Both perspectives are compatible: understanding the ideas they develop helps us know what they are thinking when they write and what they need to learn next; but knowing what they think is not enough: they also need us to teach them, step by step, how writing works.

This has important implications for what we do in the classroom. Some of the foundational knowledge and skills needed to access written culture, such as recognising and manipulating the sounds that make up words, recognising letters, or understanding that letters represent sounds, do not emerge through natural development, nor can it be left solely to interaction with texts and communicative situations. The same applies to the physical act of handwriting: to become fluent, children need to control their movements, learn how to form letters, hold a pencil and position the paper, and, above all, practise (3). None of this happens simply because a child matures or is surrounded by written words: it has to be learned and therefore also be taught.

This does not mean abandoning writing for communicative purposes. We write to communicate. But not only that. We also write to think and learn. And just as nobody learns to play an instrument simply by performing pieces (you also have to practise scales and technical exercises), the basic skills of writing need not be acquired solely through communicative situations. Writing with a purpose can coexist from the outset with time devoted to learning and practising the skills that, over time, will enable children to write with increasing automaticity.

Let us imagine two children in the same class: María, who has already understood that letters represent the sounds in words and can form them with some accuracy, and Sergio, who is still scribbling and does not associate what he draws with any sound. María will probably soon begin to use writing as a tool for learning. But what will happen to Sergio? If the school simply waits for him to mature or relies on him to discover for himself how writing works, his initial difficulties may grow as he progresses through school, widening the gap between him and his classmate. By contrast, if from the outset it provides him with structured teaching based on the best available evidence, within a context of trust, support and high expectations, he is far more likely to learn to write and, in turn, to use writing to continue learning.

Ferreiro and Teberosky helped us better understand what happens when children first grapple with writing and recognise the value of their initial ideas about it. After nearly five decades, we have far more evidence about how we can help them progress. Bringing this evidence into classroom practice does not mean abandoning those contributions, but enriching them with everything we have learned since then. Equity does not mean waiting for all children to discover how writing works; it means ensuring that all children receive the teaching they need, so that the circumstances into which a child is born do not determine what they have the opportunity to learn.

Thank you for your work.

References:

(1) Ferreiro, E. and Teberosky, A. (1979). Los sistemas de escritura en el desarrollo del niño. Siglo XXI Editores.

(2) Richard Mayer (2009) argued that a theory of how students learn is not necessarily a theory of how they should be taught. Along the same lines, Kirschner, Sweller and Clark (2006) showed that the fact that knowledge is actively constructed does not imply that teaching should be based on discovery or minimal teacher guidance.

Mayer, R. E. (2009). Constructivism as a theory of learning versus constructivism as a prescription for instruction. In S. Tobias & T. M. Duffy (Eds.), Constructivist instruction: Success or failure? (pp. 184–200). Routledge.

Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J. and Clark, R. E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75–86. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4102_1

(3) For a synthesis of the main contributions of research on the teaching and early acquisition of writing, see Tirado Ramos, M. Á. (2025). Pensar con lápiz y papel: Aportaciones de la investigación a la enseñanza de la escritura. Supervisión 21, 78. https://doi.org/10.52149/Sp21/78.11

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